


you will find me where you left me

by revolutionnaire



Category: Formula 1 RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, M/M, Summer Slash Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-05
Updated: 2009-09-05
Packaged: 2017-12-14 21:03:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/841348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/revolutionnaire/pseuds/revolutionnaire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>for as long as you can remember, you have been a shapeshifter. you have an innumerable amount of forms and shapes and masks and disguises, but there is only one constant in your life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you will find me where you left me

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the f1slash@LJ Summer Slash 2009 superpowers AU challenge. The superpower I got was "shapeshifting." There were also additional prompt words: engineered, slick, satsuma, tsunami

 

1.

For as long as you can remember, you have been a shapeshifter.

You keep it a secret, this little ability of yours. The only other person to know is your mother. _You're like a chameleon_ , she says one day, utterly exasperated, as you lounge lazily on the couch by the window. _Who are you really?_

You just smile and shift.

 

 

2.

And maybe you really are some sort of a chameleon; gracefully sliding from one form to another depending on who you're with. It's a sure-fire, infallible strategy. It has not failed you once.

On the track, you are no more than a bridesmaid. The ugly to Hamilton's beautiful, or perhaps the little step that leads up to the podium. And you still smile, you know, you're still gracious. All you say is, _I'm just grateful I can drive for a team like McLaren. I must thank them for giving me this chance_. Nobody makes mention of it, but everybody knows you will never be first. _What a good guy he is, this Kovalainen,_ they all say. _But I'm not, I'm not_ , you want to scream. _You don't know anything._

You think of it as a closet; a closet filled to the brim with all your different costumes and masks. You wear a different one every day. It hasn’t always been easy-- sometimes sliding into one of your different forms is as torturous as pulling on a pair of shoes that you have long outgrown, or a pair of jeans that are three sizes too small. And sometimes, your masks and costumes will crack just a little and give way, and the real you peeks out. You have learnt that you would rather endure the pain of being in a costume that didn’t fit than standing there naked and exposed for all the world to see.

And so you learn how to smile when you are devastated, how to laugh and joke when really all you want to do is retreat to the dark solitude of silence. But more than anything, you learn how to lie and always say what you never mean.

You also learn how to live with this reality, because it is a reality that you have constructed for yourself. It is a reality where no one will really ever know who you are and somehow, you are strangely at ease with that idea.

 

 

3.

But you are you when you are with Fernando. You can't explain it; it just is. With Fernando, you are Heikki Johannes Kovalainen and if Fernando knows that there is a difference between the smiles you give him and the smiles you hand out on the track, he doesn’t say.

There have been countless times where you have startled awake in the middle of the night, overcome by the sudden fear that you are slowly losing who you really are. But when you are with Fernando, when the comforting press of his palm is warm against the small of your back and when the soft brush of lips against your own, it comes to you like a sudden epiphany. You are you, and you exist, invincible and inseparable.

You exist, unquestionably, as Heikki Johannes Kovalainen. You are Heikki Kovalainen and it is woven into the very fibre of your being, into every cell and your soul in its entirety, and you are in love with Fernando Alonso.

 

 

4.

You don’t know how it all began, your falling in love with him.

(Perhaps it was a smile he threw in your direction as he climbed out of his car after practice one day – he, Fernando Alonso, the shining star and world champion, and you nothing more than a lowly test driver. Or maybe it was the curl of his fingers around your own, or maybe it was simply the way he blinked and bared his teeth in an easy smile at the sun.)

Neither do you know how you end up in your trailer on a burning Australian afternoon with your jeans around your ankles, cold sweat pooling and glistening in the crevice behind your knees, turning your skin cool and numb. You have no idea how you end up with Fernando's head buried in your lap, dark hair brushing shyly against the bare skin of your belly as his mouth and lips work sweetly and obediently, or why you're grasping at that head of hair, or how you've suddenly become a gasping, moaning, writhing mass of nerves and sparking synapses that threatens to explode and stills only after your hips jerk up - once, (you bump against the ridged roof of Fernando's mouth and oh god, you don't know what to do with yourself) and again - and a sob escapes your throat.

You hang on to Fernando long after you come, and gingerly wrap your shuddering arms around his strong neck as his shoulders quietly heave in an attempt to catch his breath.

 _I love you_ , you want to say, but you can't, so you press a breathless kiss on the top of his head instead.

Long after he leaves, your skin still remembers the feel of his touch; a ghosting of fingertips down your spine, and the hot tickle of imaginary breath against your neck. It is as though your entire body just cannot forget the memory of him.

 

 

5.

You know you're not the convention of _beautiful_ ; you are too pale, too skinny, with lips that are a little too thin, but Fernando tells you that you are the most beautiful person he's ever seen. He tells you so earnestly, and with such sincerity and conviction, eyes dark and jaw set in that endearingly stubborn way-- and if anyone is beautiful, it is him, it is Fernando; he is so beautiful that sometimes it makes your heart ache and breath catch in your throat when you look at him and you want so badly to tell him _I think you are perfect_. But he tells you that you are beautiful, so perhaps - maybe just a little - you begin to believe it.

And so, you shift again.

This time you are just a little more beautiful.

 

 

6.

You sit on the bed, cross-legged, and watch as he takes a little orange satsuma from the complimentary fruit bowl. He peels it apart the way he peels you apart. Every layer you have taken all your life to build up gives way and falls apart uselessly under his tender fingers. It is a tedious task, but he is patient and persistent. He picks at your nerves, and carefully strips them from your veins. He works at you unyieldingly, with ferocious determination and resolve, and soon there you stand in front of him, helplessly naked and stripped down until you are left with nothing at all. You are his for the taking.

The best thing is he doesn’t even realise what he’s doing to you.

As he slowly pulls apart the fruit, strings of white papery skin stretch between the neatly defined segments and give way. He peels a section off for you, holds it in his hand and stretches it out to you like an offering. You shake your head and without breaking eye contact, smile, take his hand and bring it to your mouth. Gently, you enclose your lips over the glistening piece of fruit between his fingers, making sure that the hot, damp inside of your lower lip grazes against the underside of his thumb.

You swallow, and the citrus bite of the satsuma - cool, sweet, and tart - slips down your throat.

You have not yet let go off his hand.

Dropping your gaze from his eyes (which have by now darkened and clouded over with something that looks a little like lust, pure want and selfish need), you study the delicate tracery of blue-green veins beneath the translucent skin of his palms, and as you follow those very veins up along his wrist with nipping teeth and apologetic kisses, he moans and you smile at the lingering smell of citrus that clings to his fingers.

 

 

7.

When you think you are about to fall apart and lose yourself again, you remember his face and a fluid warmth sweeps up from the pit of your stomach and, with the same unforgiving force of the tide crashing into a cave by the sea, rushes into your head, and fills it with a pressure that blinds you for a while. But it is at this moment of blindness that you feel like you see clearer than you ever have before.

 

 

8.

It’s not always easy being with Fernando, simply because for the past few years, it hasn’t been easy _being_ Fernando Alonso.

There are times when he simply refuses to talk. He settles into these determined, furious silences; he becomes an impenetrable wall of seething anger.

At times like that, you wish you could morph into something - anything - that could break down Fernando's wall-- a small crack, a roaring hurricane, a massive tsunami, an atomic bomb, or a million angry people.

But for all your adeptness at shape-shifting, nothing you do can make Fernando talk.

It goes on for a painfully long time, his not talking to you. It has been months, and with every passing day, you feel something like acid eating away at you from the inside. There’s this mass in your chest, right, and it’s like this huge sopping wad of cotton or tissue paper wedged right in there, dead center, right at the base of your trachea where it diverges into your bronchi. It’s sitting there, absorbing all your sadness, and when you think of him, you can feel it expand, expand, expand until it gets too big for your trachea and it pushes against the walls of your respiratory structures until you are terrified you may explode from the inside, and that’s when you feel like crying.

But you know what Fernando’s been through-- all the scandals and hyperboles, slammed doors and threats to quit, and Lewis fucking Hamilton, and you’re sure Fernando doesn’t need another scandal, especially not one that you are sure will damage him a thousand times more than any of the ones he’s already fighting off. And so you shift again (this time to an impenetrable wall of your own, a wall with a perpetual smile), and remain silent.

It’s another one of those dreadful, empty nights and you are lying in the pitch black darkness of your room, trying to ignore the scathing burn of oppressive sorrow that’s radiating out of every pore of your body and crushing the air from your pitiful lungs. It’s getting close to unbearable when out of the suffocating silence, you hear two lonely desolate knocks at your door and you know without a doubt that it's him. You open the door, and Fernando shuffles in, head bowed, face dark. He walks right into you, and all 180 pounds of him leans entirely on your small frame. Wordlessly, he buries his face in your neck, your arms encircle his defeated shoulders, and as you carry the weight of his head on your narrow shoulders, he cries.

He cries silently-- if it weren't for the slow subtle heave of his body against yours and shuddering intake of breath, you wouldn't even know.

And even though the air in the room is stealthily and silently still, you feel as though the harshest wind in the world is whipping at your face, lashing against your skin with enough force to draw stinging tears from your eyes. The tears squeeze out of the corner of your smarting eyes, and as they slip unobtrusively down your cheeks, they eat away at the mask you have worn for the past few months.

 

 

9.

Sometimes, when you’re with Fernando, you feel that this is exactly what you were made for; that every little event in your life has just been part of a conglomeration of coincidences engineered to lead you to him. You were made to be with Fernando. You must have been, because it's just too perfect for it _not_ to be so. You have an innumerable amount of forms and shapes and masks and disguises, but there is only one constant in your life, and that is Fernando.

 

 

10.

Four hundred years ago, Johannes Kepler unraveled the secrets of the universe by inscribing the five perfect geometric solids within each other, and that’s how you feel with Fernando. The two of you fit together like the solids of Kepler’s universe; oh, the way you fit together, it becomes your universe.

It is your universe and Fernando is the astronomer who unravels it, who unravels _you_ , who lays bare your secrets and finds a miracle in every single one. Lips catching in lips, lying cheek to cheek, the slick slide of skin against skin - one blistering hot and the other cool, dry, smooth - and desperate hands clutching at bruised ribs and clashing hearts-- it's perfect.

It is maddeningly perfect.


End file.
